MARCH 8, 1999:
Poor Michael Powell. In 1960, the esteemed British director of The
Red Shoes made a movie called Peeping Tom. It concerns a
photographer, Mark (Carl Boehm), who films pretty girls through a movie
camera with two special attachments: a knife that stabs the subject when
the film rolls, and a mirror for her to watch. Mark then watches the films
in his basement, searching for the perfect expression of fear. Today
Peeping Tom looks remarkably prescient in its linking of sex, death,
and the viewer's own passive voyeurism. At the time, though, even as Alfred
Hitchcock was reaping the rewards of the similar Psycho, Powell was
vilified. He made only four more films before his death in 1990.

Had Powell been a sharp guy like Joel Schumacher, the director of
8MM, he could've used sicker material and gotten a budget bigger
than all his films put together--and, to swipe a line from John Prine, all
he would've had to lose was his point of view. Well, he would've had to
change a few things--starting with the similarity between his pervy movie
buff and the popcorn-munchers who pay to see his exploits. Then, like
Schumacher, Powell could've seen his grisly images flickering in mall
cinemas all over America, instead of in the one or two cities where
Peeping Tom is currently getting an extremely limited rerelease.

To do that, however, Powell would've ended up making Peeping Tom
Lite--which pretty much sums up 8MM, a weak, murky shocker that
fails to deliver on its own grimy threats. You know you're living in a
great country when the mainstream film industry ponies up something like
$60 million for a movie about snuff films, the mythical underground porn
movies in which women are slaughtered during sex. But what's repellent
about 8MM isn't so much its subject as the way the movie packages
and sells this hard candy to its audience.

In its basic premise and its unconvincing moralizing, 8MM recalls
the leering sexposs of smut's golden era, in which a crusading investigator
inevitably played your tour guide through Sin City. Here he's detective Tom
Welles, played by Nicolas Cage, who's hired to find out whether a dead
millionaire's 8mm snuff film is real. Going underground as a buyer, Welles
uncovers a black-market industry linked to slimy auteur Dino Velvet (Peter
Stormare) and a masked snuff star known only as "the Machine."

Even in 8MM's own script, snuff movies are dismissed as urban
legend. It's hard to get worked up about them these days--not when every
calamity is camcorder material, not in the age of video nasties and
America's Deadliest Chases. Our duplicity in watching this stuff, on
the other hand, is a story worth investigating. Had 8MM made Welles,
our surrogate, more of an active participant in the snuff scene, the movie
might've been a powerfully sick exploration of the casual atrocities we've
come to accept as viewers. Instead, Cage recoils like Jerry Falwell at
Wigstock, cueing us that we're all on his moral high ground. Fear not: you
still get to see a little B&D, some doctored Filipino roughies, and a
stripper, and you can fool yourself into feeling morally superior at the
same time.

Here, as in his overpraised Seven, screenwriter Andrew Kevin
Walker mixes chamber-of-horrors jolts with dime-store philosophizing about
human nature and Ultimate Evil. Yet what's on display here isn't the
banality of evil so much as the evil of banality. Every wrong turn is
exacerbated by Joel Schumacher, whose style is to art-direct a movie to
death in every insignificant detail while fumbling the big picture. The
porn underworld he presents is so fashionably hellish it's ludicrous: Every
set looks like a Nine Inch Nails video.

Then again, would 8MM really be any better if it were better
made? The creepiest thing about this litany of ho-hum depravities is that
we'd pay to see it, and that we'd still feel unaffected afterward. As an
antidote, I recommend an Austrian film called Funny Games, just out
on video. Two clean-cut youths invite themselves into a vacation home, and
for the next 90 minutes they beat, stab, and torture the family inside. The
kicker comes when they address you, the viewer, as their implicit
accomplice, at one point helpfully rewinding for you. I resented every
moment of Funny Games, but it asks the question 8MM dodges:
What will you accept in the name of entertainment, and why?

--Jim Ridley

Mob mentality

Sometimes, to create popular entertainment, you need only combine two
elements that no one ever thought of combining before. Slasher flicks and
space opera? You've got Alien, my friend. Big special effects and
period romance? Call me Titanic. Mafia poses and psychiatrist jokes?
Bring on Analyze This, the latest cinematic Reese's Cup.

The shtick in Analyze This is simple. Robert De Niro plays a mob
boss suffering from anxiety attacks a few weeks before a big organized
crime meeting. He seeks the counsel of a therapist (Billy Crystal), who is
a few weeks away from marrying a Miami newscaster (Lisa Kudrow, who
illuminates every scene she enters). There's very little plot, a bare
minimum of clever detail, and aside from a shared character trait between
the two protagonists, there's not much depth.

Instead, we get scene after scene of De Niro interrupting Crystal's
daily affairs to ask advice, and the two of them sparring over the benefits
of applying analytical thought to the actions of a cold-blooded killer. De
Niro alternates between what my wife calls "the face"--a pained, brooding
grimace that indicates his character's mind has gone slack--and a gruff,
sarcastic patter that underlines his cunning. Meanwhile, Crystal plays his
character as timid but indignant, afraid of being killed but unwilling to
tell the Don what he wants to hear. It's a repetitive routine, but it works
because of the distinctive personality conflict.

Billy Crystal's recent work, on film as well as in his occasional TV
appearances, has been marked by an undercurrent of misery. It's as though
his faltering movie career and the obligation of being the Academy's
favorite dancing monkey on Oscar night has sapped his enthusiasm for
performing. Luckily, Analyze This largely requires Crystal to be
sullen. As for De Niro, the rage bubbling beneath his attempts to be polite
makes for lively comedy, even if the film follows him a little too far into
the world of mob violence and 12-letter profanity.

Director Harold Ramis has made brighter films (the sublime Groundhog
Day), but he's also made worse (Club Paradise). All he really
has to do here is pass out the script (by too many chefs to compliment),
point the camera at his stars, and feed us their mix of chocolate and
peanut butter. As it happens, this confection is easy to stomach.